Anne Franck wrote and re-wrote her Diary, the re-writing having been interrupted by deportation and death in a Nazi camp. Starting from both these versions, the author gives an account of the evolution with Anne of the discourse about her own self, right at the puberty stage and of the part played by the Diary in the experience of one’s own self being in full development. Here the diary is thought in terms of a container, i.e. as the seat of a task of both memory and renounciation but also as the evidence of an incarnated testimony.
After having the described the ordinary complaints, as a necessity in those days of adolescence, our text, starting from a few clinical vignettes, shows the several specificities of the surge and the therapeutic approach of the adolescent complaint. The part played by a traumatic scene liable to expresse the complaint and its content are facts of a narcissistic cathexes specifically intertwined with libidinal cathexes are thus considered as typical of complaint at adolescence.
This paper tries to analyze the pathologies, behaviours, cultural hiatus and psychical representations of adolescents in prison. Such a research was conceived according to their own conception of Aids. The several multifarious associations generated by this illness stress the link existing between risk behaviours and sexual representations. Here the whole of the adolescent problematics becomes caricatural.
The comparison of clinical situations of two men having relations of a homosexual type in adolescence leads one to comprehend nascent homosexuality in relation to the disarray of the adolescent confronted with the language of parental passion. It results from this study, that if the homosexual act in adolescense consists of seeking another self mirrored outside the self, it is essentially as a function of the image of the parents merged into one that constitutes this act. The homosexual relationship in adolescence might not be built so much on following a process of similarity, as in organizing itself around a confrontation with another, different from himself and essentially enigmatic.
The adolescent subject is confronted with the integration of his genital sexual identity and his future adulthood among other adults. These changes do not occur without reorganization of the phallic symbol, sign of narcissistic completness with the corporal supports referring to the total body and the penis. At the same time as the evolution of the phallic symbol, a revision of the ideals which are associated with it, are being reworked. The difficulties encountered are accompanied by defensive movements, homoerotic in particular, liable to be fixated. The models of identification offered to the young subject by adults have an important influence on his future.
One of the aspects of homosexuality in adolescence turns on the axis of the relation to the grandiose father. This alienating representations blocks the subject in a masochist submission leading to infantile auto-erotism. The newness of the arrival of puberty is thwarted in its oedipal expectations : avoidance of castration, the lessening of the symbolic image of the father in games of phallic seduction of the negative Oedipus complex. We offer the hypothesis of an impulse investment of a « maternel father », taking care of the distress of the adolescent, neglected by the mother, by seducting him.
The adolescent regularly shifts between the necessity of self identification and the need for self differentiation : homophilia is set, because of this fact, at the core of this process of adolescence, as we are first reminded. Between homophilia and the « question of homosexuality » the limit is certainly often slight, with the consultant and his patient constanly being confronted by the patient’s diverse variations of a homosexuality whether it be narcissistic, neurotic, perverse, fear of abandonment, etc.
This article focuses more precisely on the narcissistic component of homosexuality, considering the early mother infant relationship and attemps to distinguish the situation of the boy from that of the girl.
Several clinical cases are used as illustrations.
In ancient Greece, the period corresponding to adolescence is conceived and institutionalized differently, depending on the sex. For boys, the most important rites of initiation involve the entry into adulthood. For girls, this moment is situated earlier and the ritual practices are supposed to correspond to a preparation for marriage. Myths highlight the difficulties and failures. Hunting accidents correspond to an inability to achieve sexual and behavorial equilibrium in some, manic crises and suicide in others. The deities in charge of overseeing these critical periods are always involved in these tragic scenarios.
Here we work on the infra-representational object linking distinguished at the level of differentiated representations of the object : how to be oneself ? To be oneself, is it necessary both to be like the other and different from the other ? This contradiction inherent to development, which does such violence to the adolescent, can only be thought of after the fact. It is because he could accept to be fed by others that he can detach himself from them and feel more himself. Working on the quality of narcissistic bases, the author will use models of the attachment of auto-eroticism in its function of libidinally reinvesting control. It is a dialectic between internal resources and recourse to the peceptivo-motor external world, the purpose of which is developmental, especially through the counter-investment of internal reality.
Resituating remorse in relation to the scopic drive and maternal castration, in line with the work of Bonnet (Remorse. Psychoanalysis of a Murderer), this paper attempts to determine the evolution of this affect, and especially its involvement in the process of adolescence. The hypothesis that remorse, as anxiety of fright, can under certain conditions push one to act, will be developed, using the case of a patient who committed a motiveless murder in late adolescence. By reconstructing the childhood and adolescence of this patient, we will emphasize how hatred and infantile remorse coming from the earliest mother-child relations will be contained in adolescence only by self-destructive responses, pathological wanderings, drug abuse … These solutions rendered invalid by the impasse of puberty will lead the subject, “ haunted ” by maternal imagos, to the murderous act.
Revue semestrielle de psychanalyse, psychopathologie et sciences humaines, indexée AERES au listing PsycINFO publiée avec le concours du Centre National du Livre et de l’Université de Paris Diderot Paris 7